This specification relates to resource guidance.
The Internet provides access to a wide variety of resources. Many of these resources are provided to facilitate various tasks, e.g., on-line banking tasks, blogging tasks, purchasing tasks, etc. Often a user must perform a workflow to complete the task. While some tasks are very simple, e.g., entering an e-mail address into a field, many tasks require multiple steps, and the workflow to perform the tasks may require the processing of several or more web pages. Because some users may be confused by the relative complexity of the workflow, publishers of the resources often provide “guided help” for a workflow.
Guided help is used to help users discover and try new features, as well as help them through long or complicated tasks. There are several schemes by which assistance is provided to users. Contextual help, for example, provides “tool tips” that appear within the pages of an application near potential areas of difficulty or confusion. However, contextual help is usually implemented as part of an application build, is typically only applicable to a particular context, and does not take into account an overall workflow context.
“Help center” documentation is another way to provide user assistance. Such documentation includes detailed article-style help information, usually in an organized or searchable database. These articles cover specific features or uses of the application, and individual topics may be linked to from within the relevant areas of the application itself or from within relevant tooltips. These articles are typically provide outside of a resource environment (e.g., as another web page or a separate application). A user must often navigate back and forth between steps, or print certain pages before returning to the application interface.
“Wizards” are another way to guide step-by-step processes. Wizards guide a user through a work flow by a series of dialogs with next/previous buttons. Wizards are often used to help new users set up an application, or to automate certain functionality for the most common case. Wizards, however, usually make changes on a user's behalf, and thus abstract away the actual experience within the application.
Yet another assistance paradigm is “beginner mode” in an environment. Beginner modes are a slightly (or drastically) different user interface that can be selected for a novice user. Beginner modes often hide advanced options and uncommon configuration options or functionality from the new user. A beginner mode is either toggled by the user or entered/exited automatically based on some criteria or heuristic. When the user switches from beginner to expert mode in an application, however, the user is faced with a new and unfamiliar interface.
Another assistance feature is provided by the use of scripts for web page resources. The scripts provide pop-up windows by certain user interface elements. The pop-up windows include explanatory text, and navigation features to a next pop-up window or a previous pop-up window. However, the scripts and associated data do not transition based on user inputs to the underlying resource, and thus a user must manually transition to the next window. This can be cumbersome and, for complex tasks, distracting. Furthermore, the generation of such scripts requires a relatively high proficiency in mark-up language programming and scripting, as the underlying resource for which the script is being prepared must be examined by an author for certain tags and identifiers.